Nigeria’s Stolen Daughters is a moving and terrifying insight into Nigeria’s brutal civil war. On 14th April 2014, 276 school girls aged between 16 and 18 were kidnapped form a school in Chibok, northern Nigeria. They were taken by Boko Haram, a violent Islamic insurgent movement, and hidden in the vast Sambisa forest. Following a global social media campaign around the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, featuring global celebrities and Michelle Obama, huge pressure was brought to bear on the Nigerian Government to get the girls back.
Four years later more than 100 of the girls have been freed – they have been kept in a secret safe house in the capital Abuja. For the first time TV cameras have been granted access to the girls and in this powerful 60-minute documentary we follow them as they adapt to life after their traumatic imprisonment at the hands of Boko Haram.
The Chibok Girls live in a gilded cage, cut off from contact with the world’s media and provided with education and counselling that continues as they move into government funded places at the American University of Nigeria.
Their fate could not be more different to the thousands of other Nigerian women and children who have fallen prey to Boko Haram.
In the brutalised city of Maidugari we meet some of these Forgotten Girls. They have deeply disturbing stories of their treatment at the hands of Boko Haram and their troubles haven’t ended on their escape from the forest – in Maidugari they are often treated with suspicion because of their connection with Boko Haram.
Female suicide bombers have killed scores of people in the city. And for the Forgotten Girls there are none of the privileges afforded the Chibok Girls – many live hand to mouth in the slums and refugee camps, abandoned by the Nigerian state.
Watch rare films and TV series in our Documentaries section.
Watch Daily News at Alistair Reign Channel on YouTube.
Ross Kemp, investigative-journalist turns his attention to the deadliest migrant route in the world. The 1,000 miles of Libyan desert, a journey more dangerous than the sea, followed by the treacherous Mediterranean crossing from Tripoli to Italy in rubber boats unfit for purpose. Three thousand people make this journey every week. Twelve die each day.
A dinghy loaded with 120 refugees trying to reach Italy. (Photo: The Sun).
In Ross Kemp: Libya’s Migrant Hell, he tracks the route with his usual brawn studded with the occasional fleck of emotion. This is not nuanced film-making, but somehow that feels right for an issue so huge, horrifying and urgent; a bit of plain-spoken directness feels welcome.
This video has been removed to make space for new videos. We have a wide variety of films to watch in theVideosection.
Beginning in the Sahara, where threats include smugglers, Isis training camps, armed militias and kidnappers, Kemp intercepts a truck rammed with 22 people.
Ruined houses in Libya. 2017. (Photo: GETTY Images).
“We are running for our lives,” one man explains. Later, he joins 30 men and women on a 350-mile desert stretch to the next handover point: a seven-hour journey travelling 70 mph in 45C heat.
Instantly sweating like a pig in his headscarf, Kemp declares: “I don’t think I could do it, that’s for sure.”
Watch rare films and TV series in our Documentaries section.
Watch Daily News at Alistair Reign Channel on YouTube.
This documentary explores deep into the minds and activities of what motivates, and what makes this violent, radicalized group appeal to its followers.
The crew visits several Middle East, South Asia and Africa locations affected by terror inflicted by the religious militants enforcing the law of Saudi Arabia’s state religion – Wahhabism.
“When he crossed the Olympics marathon finish line, Feyisa Lilesa put his hands above his head in an “X.” Most of those who watched Lilesa’s spectacular silver medal performance didn’t know what that meant — or just how dangerous a protest they were watching,” reported Kevin Sieff, Africa Bureau Chief for the Washington Post.
Lilesa was protesting the Ethiopian government’s killing of hundreds of the country’s Oromo people, the country’s largest ethnic group, which has long complained about being marginalized by the country’s government. The group has held protests this year over plans to reallocate Oromo land.
Many of those protests ended in bloodshed. According to Human Rights Watch, more than 400 people have been killed since November 2015.
Watch Alistair Reign’s newscast on video.
Kevin Sieff was among the first people to explain the meaning of Fayisa’s gesture on his Twitter account. Fayisa has received overwhelming support for his actions of protest.
This is the equivalent of the 1968 Black Power salute in Mexico City, but riskier. If he returns to Ethiopia, Lilesa could be jailed.
In their internal review published on June 21, 2016, MSF (Doctors without Borders) looked into the February 2016 attack on the Malakal Protection of Civilians Site (PoC) in South Sudan, including a review of the post-event situation:
Violence erupted between internally displaced persons (IDPs) of different ethnic groups in a protection of civilians (PoC) site in Malakal, South Sudan, on February 17, 2016, and continued until the next afternoon. [01]
There are strong indications that external military forces were also involved in the fighting.
The violence and ensuing fire caused the destruction of large swathes of the camp (35 percent of shelters were destroyed) and left between 25 and 65 people dead (including two MSF staff), 108 injured and over29,000 IDPs displaced once again.
This report constitutes the findings of an internal review conducted by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) into those events.
The review aimed to provide lessons learned from MSF’s medical emergency response, as well as to help better understand the circumstances around the events and the role of the different actors.
The findings exposed a glaring failure on behalf of the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) to protect the civilians residing in the PoC site. By not ensuring that adequate preventive measures were taken, failing to act to stop the violence in a timely manner, and actively blocking the IDPs from reaching safety during a large part of the emergency, UNMISS effectively failed to protect the civilians it is mandated by the UN Security Council to protect.
The rigid structure of the UN integrated mission within the PoC site prevented an efficient emergency response, as the strong reliance that humanitarian organizations had on the UN security apparatus and its recommendations for security meant that they could not be mobilized and thus assist in the humanitarian and medical emergency response.
This resulted in a short yet acute emergency gap during the peak of the incident, where the emergency response capacity of those present in the PoC site could not be counted upon.
MSF’s medical response to the crisis was timely, relevant, and effective. MSF took the lead in the emergency response and was able to act when many others couldn’t. It treated many patients and provided refuge for the IDPs in its hospital. The team, and most notably the national staff, showed a dedicated commitment to the emergency response.
The need for better emergency preparedness and more efficient and dignified management of dead bodies are among the lessons learned by MSF from the incident. The circumstances surrounding the death of the two MSF staff need to be further investigated.
Worryingly, there are no signs, four months after the events, that the UN is taking steps to improve the situation in the PoCs or admit its mistakes in the February events.
The UN under-secretary for peacekeeping operations has recently announced that the findings of the two UN investigations conducted will shortly be made public, and we urge the UN to delay no longer.
This report is intended to open up a constructive debate within the international community to ensure that the failures of the February events are discussed and concrete measures put in place to improve the protection and living conditions for IDPs in Malakal and other PoC sites in South Sudan. [02]
To give credit where it is due, the United Nations started out with the best of intentions; with a mission set forth to prevent another holocaust and other crimes against humanity.
The time was the end of WWII, and the enormous task of convincing countries once at war to “Unite as One Nation” was accomplished by several leaders of humanity, and the UN Charter was born – a signed agreement of what constitutes humane treatment, equal rights, rules of war and international law.
However, times have changed and on the 10th of this month UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon’s statements to the Security Council committee have lost their original potency:
“Protecting civilians is an overarching responsibility involving all the critical functions of the United Nations: human rights, humanitarian, political and peacekeeping.“
Today the past accomplishments of the United Nations has lost their shine, as has the UN lost its effectiveness. In fact, the UN committees have proven powerless in matters of serious crimes against humanity openly committed worldwide.
United Nations is no longer a cure for a sick world. Evidence is in the inhumanity we see around us; committed by the very same seated members of the United Nations we count on to protect us.
The serious crimes committed by peacekeepers have gone unpunished.
The war crimes by Saudi Arabia and Israel are accepted with impunity.
The rise of Daesh, and the validation of their terrorist Islamic states.
The barbaric and public punishments inflicted on children and women.
In this chapter I will cover humanitarian crisis number one: Non-accountability of UN Peacekeeper crimes.
1.United Nations Peacekeepers
UN Peacekeepers are just as likely to inflict cruelty on the suppressed people they are charged with protecting, as the warring armies and extremists. Peacekeeping officers have been accused of engaging in serious criminal offenses such as sexual abuse, sex-trafficking, soliciting prostitutes, sexually abusing minors and forcing children into prostitution.
UN peacekeepers north of Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Reforms introduced over the past decade have failed to stamp out sex crimes by UN peacekeepers. (Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba/ AFP/ Getty).
“In November (2015), United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced he intends to start naming and shaming countries whose troops and police serving in UN peacekeeping missions face credible accusations of sexual abuse and exploitation.
“This statement came a day after he took the unprecedented move of firing the head of the peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic over the handling of dozens of misconduct allegations. The latest, brought on Tuesday by Amnesty International against the mission’s police officers, included the indiscriminate killing of a teen and his father, and rape of the daughter, a twelve-year-old (12) girl.
“”Considering the gaps in the system for reporting, investigating and prosecuting sexual abuse allegations,” (US Ambassador Samantha) Power said, the number of actual allegations against peacekeepers “could be far worse”.” [01]
There is a reason for this increasing phenomenon.
In fact, the magnitude of sexual violence and exploitation committed by peacekeeping forces on local populations, together with the U.N. response to them, has become central topics for discussion and analysis for many.
It was previous UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, in November 2004, first pledged to eliminate the scourge of sexual abuse from the United Nations peacekeepers.
The United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) statistics from their 2005 report: from the one-hundred-fifty-five (152) peacekeeping personnel dismissed for misconduct, one-hundred-seventeen (117) were members of military contingents. Besides deciding on administrative penalties against the one-hundred-seventeen (117) military officers, the United Nations has no legal authority to bring up criminal charges or enforce prosecution.
All the United Nations can do is send the officer back to his troop-contributing country, “but it cannot ensure the prosecution of that person once they have returned home” (Murphy, 2006, p.532). Typically, the environment in which the U.N. personnel operate is one where there are weak and ineffective judicial and law enforcement structures, a collapsed economy and corrupt institutions.
All of these factors create chaos and disorder that consequently facilitate misconduct.
However, “while these conditions certainly foster situations in which sexual abuse occurs or in which the likelihood of sexual abuse may increase, a contributing factor is that peacekeepers commit these violations because they believe they can get away with it,” wrote Muna Ndulo in her 2009 paper, “UN Responses to Sexual Abuse and Exploitation of Women and Girls by Peacekeepers“page 144.
The criminal liability of peacekeeping personnel, therefore, lies at the very core of successfully addressing the problem.
[a]s such, it enjoys the status, privileges and immunities of the Organization provided for in Article 105 of the UN Charter, and the UN Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the UN of 13 February 1946. UN staff members are appointed by the Secretary-General and they have the status of officials under the Convention, section 18 of which provides that officials are immune in respect of acts committed by them in their official capacity (pdf page 533).
In a similar note, Deen-Racsmany contends that “the SOFA provision on the exclusive criminal jurisdiction of the sending state over military members of national contingents (MMsNCs) constitutes a major obstacle in the way of ensuring the accountability of this category of persons for crimes and serious misconduct committed in peacekeeping operations” (2011,page 350).
in addressing the sexual abuse problem is increased recognition of the importance of women’s role in peace processes, along with the importance of incorporating female perspectives in the general U.N. peace and security framework. An effort to do just that resulted in the 2000 U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security. (pdf Resolution 1325).
However, when it comes to practice, analysts are ambivalent as to how successfully the resolution has been translated into the implementation of U.N. peacekeeping mandates. The report on the ten-year impact study on the implementation of UNSC Resolution 1325 states that while there has been significant progress in supporting women’s participation in political processes, “conflict related sexual violence as a deliberate strategy in areas of conflict still occurs with impunity” says United Nations in their 2010 report (pdf page 10).
In his meeting with UN Security Council last November,S.G. Ban Ki-moon said: “The UN lacks the power for criminal investigation and prosecution, which lets member states take whatever punitive action they choose against the troops they contribute. “In the most frustrating cases,” nothing is done at all.
““A failure to pursue criminal accountability for sexual crimes is tantamount to impunity,” he said, saying countries must quickly investigate and hold its troops accountable.
“Ban also announced several UN measures now being implemented. They include strict timelines for completing investigations, setting up immediate response teams inside peacekeeping missions to handle allegations, and suspending payments to countries whose troops face credible allegations of misconduct.
“Since its creation in April 2014, the peacekeeping mission in Central African Republic says it has received fifty-seven (57) casesof misconduct, includingeleven (11) allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse.” [02]
Yet, United Nations peacekeepers in the Central African Republic raped or sexually exploited at least eight women and girls between October and December 2015. Among the survivors are two 14-year-old girls, an 18-year-old and a 29-year-old woman who said peacekeepers gang-raped them:
The 18-year-old woman said that when she visited the Republic of Congo troop base near the airport in late 2015 seeking food or money, armed peacekeepers forced her into the bush and gang-raped her. “I didn’t want to have sex with them, but when I went to visit their base they took me into the bush,” she said. “There were three of them on me. They were armed. They said if I resisted they would kill me. They took me one by one.”
A 14-year-old girl said that in November, two peacekeepers attacked her as she walked by the MINUSCA baseat the airport. “The men were dressed in their military uniforms and had their guns,” she said. “I walked by and suddenly one of them grabbed me by my arms and the other one ripped off my clothes. They pulled me into the tall grass and one held my arms while the other one pinned down my legs and raped me. The soldier holding my arms tried to hold my mouth, but I was still able to scream. Because of that they had to run away before the second soldier could rape me.”
Another 14-year-old girl said she was walking by the MINUSCA base at an old cotton factory in late December (2015) when a peacekeeper from the Democratic Republic of Congo attacked her. “I was on a path in the bush and had walked by the MINUSCA guards when a soldier jumped out at me. He was in a uniform like the other soldiers from the [Democratic Republic of the] Congo. He had his gun with him. He slapped me in the face and made me continue to walk on the path… We walked for a while, then he ripped off my clothes and used them to tie my hands behind my back. He threw me on the ground, placed his gun to the side and got on top of me to rape me. When he was done he just left. I had to put my clothes on and I went home.”
A 29-year-old woman said that a soldier from the Democratic Republic of Congo raped her inside her home in October 2015. “I heard a knock on the door and I said I was busy. But a man said, “No, open the door…. I have come to see you.” I ignored it and thought a few minutes later that he had left. But as I finished washing he just came in. It was a MINUSCA soldier in a blue hat. I said, “What are you doing here?” and I told him to leave. But he forced himself on me and as he was stronger I had no choice.“
UN Peacekeepers stationed in refugee camps are extorting sex from children and women in exchange for food or or money, as ongoing conflict has left the population desperate.
A 16-year-old girl said that a peacekeeper from the Republic of Congo who was based at the airport gave her food and money in exchange for sex from October to December (2015). She said that soldiers instigated sexual relationships with her when she and a friend went to the base to sell alcohol: “I met him when he was on guard duty at the airport. We had sex there. After that he would come to my hut.”
The girl said that when the conflict started in Bambari she had no choice but to move near the airport for her safety and that of a family member with a disability. Once there, she said she had no means to provide for herself and her relative and felt she had no option but to exchange sex for food and money.
An 18-year-old woman said that in November (2015) she exchanged sex for food and money with soldiers presumed to be from the Republic of Congo, who were based at the airport. Her friends, who were already trading sex for basic supplies, and a family member encouraged her to approach the contingent because her family had “problems of food and money.” She said that her friends told her, “Instead of staying in your situation you should go with the Congolese so they will give you money to feed your family.”
It has been over a decade since the UN Secretary General holding office had promised to bring the crimes of Peacekeepers to justice – and NOTHING has improved, on the contrary, along with the increase in armed conflict, comes with it an increase in Peacekeeper sexual crimes and abuse. The troop-contributing country of the accused is STILL solely responsible for carrying out judicial proceedings against soldiers who commit sexual exploitation and rape.
It is2016 and the United Nations is still powerless to enforce that justice is served.
“In a country where armed groups routinely prey on civilians, peacekeepers should be protectors, not predators,” said Hillary Margolis, women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch.
“Sending peacekeepers back home is not enough. The UN needs to insist that troops’ home countries bring rapist and other abusers to justice, and that survivors get the support they need.”
Human Rights Watch documented the eight (8) cases of sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeepers, known as MINUSCA, during research in Bambari between January 16 and 30, 2016. [03]
In this chapter of my report I have focused on the region of Africa for purpose of examples of these crimes, however, almost every vulnerable nation is at risk from the abuses of UN Peacekeepers, so many in fact, it would require several chapters to cover the global epidemic of Peacekeeper’s abuse of their power and position over the people’s poverty, or vulnerability of living in refugee camps.
This type of abuse of a Peacekeeper’s position is especially heinous for this very fact – the people they abuse are already suffering terrible physical and mental health trauma before being attacked; and the insidious instigation of children reduced to prostitution to keep their families alive – these crimes against humanity should be treated with zero-tolerance.
I say – double shame on the United Nations’ Secretary General, and triple shame on its seated leaders of inhumanity.
Soldiers from the Republic of Congo killed at least 18 people, including women and children, between December 2013 and June 2015 while serving as peacekeepers in the Central African Republic.
A mass grave recently discovered near a peacekeeping base in Boali, and exhumed on February 16, 2016, uncovered the remains of twelve people, who have since been identified as the families who were forced into the back of trucks and taken into detention by the peacekeepers back in March 2014. That was the last anyone saw them alive.
OnJune 2, 2014, Human Rights Watch published information about the enforced disappearance of these victims in Boali, calling for action by AU authorities under whose auspices the peacekeeping mission was deployed. The following month, the MISCA force commander temporarily suspended the commanding officers from Boali and Bossangoa, Captain Abena and Captain Mokongo, and men under their command were redeployed to other parts of the country.
Two years after Human Rights Watch first reported on enforced disappearances by peacekeepers from the Republic of Congo, their government has taken no action toward credible investigations or justice for these crimes, said Human Rights Watch in their report.
Lewis Mudge, Human Rights Watch. (Photo: hrw.org).
The exhumation of the bodies refutes the peacekeepers’ previous claim that “the victims had escaped”.
Under the status of mission agreement between the Central African government and the AU,troop-contributing countries are responsible for holding to account members of their forces for any crimes committed in the Central African Republic.
On July 4, 2014, Human Rights Watch wrote to the foreign minister of the Republic of Congo informing him of the findings and to El Ghassim Wane, then the AU Peace and Security Department director, urging investigations and accountability for the crimes. There was no response.
“The discovery of 12 bodies is damning evidence of an appalling crime by Congolese peacekeepers, who had been sent to protect people, not prey on them,” said Lewis Mudge, Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch.
“Republic of Congo authorities shouldn’t turn a blind eye to the mounting evidence that their soldiers committed murder in Boali and elsewhere.”
These crimes took place while the peacekeepers served in the African Union (AU) peacekeeping mission, known as MISCA, and in the United Nations peacekeeping mission, known as MINUSCA.
Following the exhumation of the grave, Human Rights Watch wrote to President Denis Sassou Nguesso of the Republic of Congo and to the AU urging credible investigations to bring those responsible to justice. (Read the letter)
The bodies were badly decomposed, but their clothing and other distinctive items identified the victims as members of a group of at least 12 people the Congolese peacekeepers arrested on March 24, 2014. Those arrested had subsequently disappeared.
Human Rights Watch investigated the disappearances in Boali four times between May 2014 to April 2016. Human Rights Watch informed both UN and government authorities of the presumed location of the grave, which was about 500 meters from a MINUSCA peacekeeping base.
Yet AU peacekeepers, UN peacekeepers, and national authorities made no effort to protect the site, or to conduct a forensic exhumation to preserve evidence for future judicial proceedings.
[…]
Angered by the death of their colleague, the Congolese peacekeepers surrounded the anti-balaka leader’s house, arrested him and at least 12 others,including five women, one of whom was six months pregnant, and two children, one about 10-years-old and the other seven-months old.
Witnesses told Human Rights Watch that the detainees were taken to the peacekeeping base at about 7 p.m. and confined in villa number 6, used by a commander identified by witnesses as Captain Abena.
The peacekeepers ordered civilians who lived at or near the base to go inside their homes.
One witness said: “They came and yelled at us, ‘Go into your homes and lock the doors! Do not come out!’ They were very angry. It was the first and only time they had made us lock ourselves into our homes like that, it was not normal.”
Later that night, witnesses heard screams and a volley of gunshots from an area near the villa on the other side of the road, followed about an hour later by another round of gunfire from the same location. One witness said he overheard a heated debate among the Congolese peacekeepers between the two rounds of shooting about whether to kill the women and children, followed by the second round of gunfire.
In September 2014, when the United Nations took over peacekeeping responsibility from the AU, UN officials insisted that all existing Congolese peacekeepers be rotated out of the Central African Republic and replaced with new soldiers to ensure that none of those responsible for the abuses became part of the UN mission.
In March 2015, UN human rights investigators investigated the crimes committed by peacekeepers in Boali and in Bossangoa. On June 5, 2015, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights released a statement confirming the Human Rights Watch findings and said that “MISCA’s Congolese contingent has committed acts of enforced disappearance, torture and extrajudicial killings.”
The UN sent a number of diplomatic communications to the Congolese government in Brazzaville urging judicial investigations into the serious allegations. Little or no action was taken either by the AU or the Congolese government.
MINUSCA’s mandate includes providing support to the national police and judicial institutions. While prosecutorial jurisdiction for crimes committed by the peacekeepers lies with the Republic of Congo, in the absence of any action by Congolese judicial authorities, national authorities in the Central African Republic with support from the United Nations should begin their own investigations to seek accountability for the crimes, Human Rights Watch said.
On February 4, 2016, Human Rights Watch also published a report on sexual exploitation and abuse of women and girls by Republic of Congo peacekeepers, among others, in Bambari from mid-September to mid-December 2015.
The AU, the UN, and judicial authorities in both Congo and the Central African Republic should work together to ensure there is full accountability for these crimes and to prevent such crimes from happening again, Human Rights Watch said.
“Simply rotating troops out of the Central African Republic with no further consequences sends the message that peacekeepers can get away with murder,” Mudge said. “No peacekeeper should be above the law.”
Summary Executions in Boali by MISCA – 2014
On March 24, 2014, Congolese peacekeepers went to investigate shots they heard coming from the home of an anti-balaka leader known as “General” Maurice Konoumo. (In June 2014, Human Rights Watch erroneously reported Konoumo’s name as Mokono). When the peacekeepers tried to confiscate the weapon, Konoumo, who was drunk, refused to hand it over and a violent argument broke out. A respected local Catholic priest intervened to help calm the situation.
Shortly afterward, a group of anti-balaka fighters attacked a MISCA vehicle near Boali’s central market, throwing a grenade and opening fire with automatic weapons. The attack killed one Congolese peacekeeper and wounded four others.
Following the ambush, a group of approximately 20 MISCA soldiers surrounded Konoumo’s compound and rounded up 13 people they found at the house:
Konoumo;
his pregnant 21-year-old wife, Laurene Mombassa;
his 18-year-old son, Grace-a-Dieu Konoumo;
his son’s wife, Ingrid Konoumo, a 16-year-old Muslim survivor of an anti-balaka massacre whom Konoumo had forced into marriage with his son;
his brother, Antoine Konoumo;
an anti-balaka fighter, Richard Selebangue;
his 20-year old wife, Marie-Sandrine Selebangue;
Jaline, a 17-year-old female anti-balaka fighter;
Gbaguene, an anti-balaka fighter;
a friend from Bobissa, Jean Bruno Wilita;
Wilita’s wife, Marie Wilita, with
her 7-month-old baby;
and Derek Yawete, a 10-year-old boy visiting from Bogangolo.
The Congolese peacekeepers took the detainees to their base at ENERCA and held them at Captain Abena’s villa. The peacekeepers ordered all civilians who lived at or near the base to go inside their homes.
A witness said:
I argued with the MISCA and I said, “How can you tell me to go to my house?” But a friend said, “No, this seems serious, do not argue about this.”
I saw a vehicle go down into the camp with people in it. I could not see who it was, but the people were civilians. They were not MISCA soldiers. We stayed inside for a few hours, then around 11 p.m. we heard many shots and screams coming from near the Captain’s villa. An hour later I heard another volley of shots.
We heard the discussion between the volleys as to whether to kill the women and children.
Around 1:00 a.m. I saw their vehicles driving through the camp.
After the execution, the Congolese peacekeepers cleaned their truck with water from a pump near their villas, said witnesses Human Rights Watch interviewed in June 2015.
“The next morning there was blood everywhere around the pump,” one witness said. Another witness said: “Even today there is still human hair near the pump.”
OnJune 3, 2014, after Human Rights Watch published its report on the disappearances, the AU issued a news release saying it had opened an investigation into the allegations and based on its findings would “take the required action in accordance with the rules governing the functioning of MISCA.”
No information about this investigation has ever been made public.
In March 2015, AU officials told Human Rights Watch that a report had been drafted, but they were not at liberty to disclose its contents or conclusions. When UN human rights investigators in March 2015 investigated the crimes committed by peacekeepers in Boali and in Bossangoa, they confirmed that MISCA’s Congolese contingent had committed enforced disappearance, torture and extrajudicial killings.
Discovery of the Grave
The local non-governmental organization exhumed the grave on February 16, 2016 in the exact location indicated by the accounts given to Human Rights Watch. Local residents informed the organization, whose responsibilities include removing corpses from wells and other water sources, about the mass grave, and the group received permission for the exhumation from local authorities. The exhumation took place in the presence of local authorities, including a representative of the national police, who described the exhumation in his police report as one of “anti-balaka [who] were kidnapped by MISCA, killed and buried here.” No forensic experts were present.
The exhumation revealed 12 skulls, clothes that matched the individuals who had been reported missing in 2014, and a number of anti-balaka amulets that had been worn by the general and his fighters.
Those present at the exhumation said they did not believe the baby’s skull was found, although one of the skulls, significantly smaller than the rest, was thought to be that of a 10-year-old boy.
An individual who took part in the exhumation told Human Rights Watch: “The bodies were buried on top of each other, almost in layers. I think they had been killed first before they were put into the grave because they had just been thrown one on top of the other.”
Another said: “We first found gris-gris(traditional amulets associated with the anti-balaka), then some clothes, and then the bodies.” One person who took part in the exhumation, a former anti-balaka fighter from Boali, recognized Maurice Konomou’s jacket.
After the exhumation, the bodies were moved to new graves approximately two kilometers outside of Boali in an isolated location.
In April 2016 one of Konomou’s relatives told Human Rights Watch:
We have not forgotten what has happened. We want the MISCA soldiers to face justice. The people who are dead could have helped their families had they not been killed. We want a real investigation done, we are not satisfied with the investigation thus far. It is like the Central African Republic is nothing to the African Union. I sometimes think, “What if justice could be done? What would it look like if a real investigation was done?”
Torture and Killings in Bossangoa by MISCA – 2013
On December 22, 2013, Congolese peacekeepers tortured to death two anti-balaka leaders in Bossangoa following the brutal lynching of a Congolese peacekeeper the same day. The incident, was first reported on by Human Rights Watch in June 2014, although it was witnessed by many local UN staff members and aid workers who were staying at the MISCA base at the time for their safety.
Locked in a staff room during the incident, the UN staff and aid workers overheard the Congolese peacekeepers torturing the two men throughout the night.
Their mutilated bodies were found the next day and seen by many witnesses who confirmed that the two men suffered extensive burns and saw evidence that burning melting plastic had been dripped on their bodies.
Executions in Mambéré by MISCA – 2014
On February 26, 2014, Congolese peacekeepers in Mambéré killed two anti-balaka fighters known as “Palasie” and “Court Pied,” at the town’s main crossroads in front of a large crowd of onlookers. Witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch April 2016 said that Congolese peacekeepers told them the two men had been captured the day before in the village of Bambio.
One witness who watched the executions said:
“I saw two men with their hands tied behind their backs. There was a large group of people watching, maybe 200. All of the people were curious to see them. They forced the men to lay down on the ground. The MISCA commander took one of his soldier’s guns and he killed them…We were all shocked by what we saw. I had never seen someone killed like that.“
Another witness said the peacekeepers encouraged people to watch the public execution yelling, “These are anti-balaka, we will kill them.”
The witness said, that when a crowd had gathered, “the peacekeepers forced the two men out of their truck, made them lie down on the ground, and then shot them in the head and chest.”
After the execution, the peacekeepers forced local residents to bury the bodies saying “If you do not bury these bodies right now we will kill three times as many people.”
The residents buried the bodies in the cemetery behind the gendarmerie.
Excessive Use of Force and Killings in Mambéré by MINUSCA – 2015
On June 10, 2015, UN Congolese peacekeepers based in Mambéré detained and beat four men, two of whom later died from their injuries.
Based on Human Rights Watch research conducted in April 2016, peacekeepers detained the men because of a dispute about a woman between a peacekeeper and one of the victims. Human Rights Watch found no information to corroborate that the men had been involved in criminal activities, as MINUSCA alleged in a news release on June 10.
Three of the men – Alban Nambokinena, Kouvo Befio, and Douala Bakiko were neighbors. Witnesses said they were taken from their homes in the early hours of June 10 and severely beaten as they were arrested.
Nambokinena said:
I heard a knock on my door around 4 a.m. and I opened it. There were the MINUSCA in military uniforms with their blue helmets.
At first I thought that maybe this was for some work so I went outside, but the MINUSCA grabbed me and started to beat me there in front of my house. At the same time, they pulled my neighbor Kouvo out of his house and started beating him too. They were kicking and beating us with their rifles.
I knew that I had not done anything so I was yelling, “What did I do?” They were just beating me and speaking to each other in their own language.
Another witness, a friend of the arrested men, said: “When I saw the men put into the truck I tried to follow, but the MINUSCA pointed their guns at me and said, ‘If you follow us we will kill you.’ I just went into my house and cried.”
Together with a fourth person, Bernard Lamaye, the men were taken to the Congolese MINUSCA base at an area called “scierie” – a timber processing center – where the beatings continued for hours.
Nambokinena said:
When we arrived at the scierie, they really started to beat us seriously there out in the open. They did something they called “operation helicopter.” It was like this: four men would each grab a hand or leg. Then they threw us up as high as they could. We came down and landed on planks, they would kick us as we fell.
They were trying to break our bodies. I did not really hear what they were saying because the Congolese were speaking between themselves. They weren’t asking questions. They did not interrogate us or tell us to admit to something, they just beat us. They gave me the “operation helicopter” four times. I can’t tell you how it hurt my neck, back, and head. After some time I did not feel any pain though. I thought my back was going to break in two, I really thought that was happening.
Finally, when I could not feel anything, the commander said, “Ok, that is enough put them in the container.” This was maybe around 6 a.m. because the sun was coming up.
The men were locked in an old shipping container. Within hours one of the men, Douala, died from his injuries. Another, Befio, fell into a comma.
Nambokinena said:
We started to cry. We called for the MINUSCA. A guard yelled, “Stop it! Don’t cry!” We said, “No, one of ours is dead!” The guard said, “If we open the door and we see someone is not dead, you will suffer.” But they opened the door and a MINUSCA soldier came in. He saw that Douala was dead. He saw straight away.
On learning about the death, the peacekeepers took the remaining three men to the hospital in Berberati, 125 kilometers from Mambéré. Witnesses said they saw the men being carried to the MINUSCA truck. One witness said, “It was clear they could not walk.”
The peacekeepers told hospital staff the men were thieves. Hospital staff and local officials said they recognized the men, knew them to be from Mambéré and did not believe they were criminals. Medical staff members said that Befio was in a coma when he arrived at the hospital. He died onJune 14, 2015.
The day after Befio’s death, MINUSCA flew the two survivors to Bangui, the capital and took them by MINUSCA ambulance to a local hospital. Local authorities gave each one 50,000 francs (approximately US $85).
Under normal procedures, suspected criminals are transferred to Bangui by MINUSCA’s police force, UNPOL, at the request of national or local prosecutors and handed over to national authorities. In this case, the national prosecutor told Human Rights Watch he was not aware of any request from his office to transport the two survivors to Bangui.
Once they recuperated, the men left the hospital. They were not charged or given any other assistance. “We were quickly forgotten,” one said. After a month in Bangui, the men ran out of funds and hitchhiked back to Mambéré.
Nambokinena said:
If I am accused of a crime let them come arrest me. It is the MINUSCA who committed a crime. I have not recovered from this. I have pain in my neck, back, and hips. I have tried to work, but it has been difficult because my job is to move heavy wood onto trucks. I now need to ask someone to take my place because my job was so physical and you need to be strong.
I don’t have the money to see a doctor. When I make a little money I get a doctor to give me medicine which will give me the strength to move around. It is difficult to move around too much and I now get bad headaches.
I think about what happened to me a lot. I am traumatized. When I see the Congolese in town I remember what happened. The population is still scared of the Congolese because of this.
I have two children and my life has changed for the worse.
I can’t feed my kids like before.
I don’t have the strength to work as I did.
I now make less than half of what I used to make because my health has been affected.
For all my troubles I was only given that 50,000 francs and I used it all in Bangui on medicine.
Twenty Congolese peacekeepers from the unit in Mambéré were repatriated after these killings. Human Rights Watch is not aware that any soldier has been held to account for the killings and serious beatings.
MINUSCA investigated the incident in 2015and sent the results to the government of the Republic of Congo via a diplomatic note. To the best of Human Rights Watch’s knowledge there has been no response.
In April 2016 MINUSCA opened an internal investigation, known as a Board of Inquiry, into the incident. The Board of Inquiry will report on the internal procedures of MINUSCA and how the mission reacted.
Since November (2015), state security forces have killed hundreds of protesters and arrested thousands in Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest region. It’s the biggest political crisis to hit the country since the 2005 election but has barely registered internationally.
Part of the problem is the government’s draconian restrictions on news reporting, human rights monitoring, and access to information imposed over the past decade. But restrictions have worsened in the last month. Some social media sites have been blocked, and in early March security officials detained two international journalists overnight while they were trying to report on the protests.
As one foreign diplomat told (Felix Horne), “It’s like a black hole, we have no idea what is happening. We get very little credible information.”
With difficulty, Human Rights Watch interviewed nearly 100 protesters.
They described security forces firing randomly into crowds, children as young as nine being arrested, and Oromo students being tortured in detention.
But the Ethiopian media aren’t telling these stories. It’s not their fault.
Photo Added:Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s original “developmental autocrat” and behind him (left), Hailemariam Desalegn, who would succeed him upon his death and has continued what critics say are bread-without-freedom growth policies.(Photo/Mail & Guardian Africa).
Ethiopian journalists have to choose between self-censorship, prison, or exile. Ethiopia is one of the leading jailers of journalists on the continent. In 2014 at least 30 journalists fled the country and six independent publications closed down. The government intimidates and harasses printers, distributors, and sources.
The government may believe that by strangling the flow of information coming out of Oromia it can limit international concern and pressure. And so far the response from countries that support Ethiopia’s development has been muted.
The deaths of hundreds, including many children, have largely escaped condemnation.
State security forces in Ethiopia have used excessive and lethal force against largely peaceful protests that have swept through Oromia, the country’s largest region, since November 2015. Over 400 people are estimated to have been killed, thousands injured, tens of thousands arrested, and hundreds, likely more, have been victims of enforced disappearances.
Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest region. (Photo: Irish Aid Org).
The protests began on November 12, 2015, in Ginchi, a small town 80 kilometers southwest of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, which is surrounded by Oromia region and home to most of Ethiopia’s estimated thirty-five (35) million Oromo, the country’s largest ethnic group.
The Ethiopian government has also increased its efforts to restrict media freedom – already dire in Ethiopia – and block access to information in Oromia. The government has also jammed diaspora-run television stations, such as the US-based Oromia Media Network (OMN), and destroyed private satellite dishes at homes and businesses.
The decision of authorities in Ginchi to clear a forest and football field for an investment project triggered protests in at least four hundred (400) different locations across all the seventeen (17) zones in Oromia.
Photo Added: The Ethiopian government has reportedly ceased its plan to expand its capital, Addis Ababa, after protesters from Oromia demonstrated against the expansion plans over concerns that they would lose their homes. (Photo:Twitter @ethiopiacrisis).
Security forces, according to witnesses, shot into crowds, summarily killing people during mass roundups, and torturing detained protesters.
Because primary and secondary school students in Oromia were among the early protesters, many of those arrested or killed were children under the age of 18.
Security forces, including members of the federal police and the military, have arbitrarily arrested students, teachers, musicians, opposition politicians, health workers, and people who provided assistance or shelter to fleeing students.
This report is based on more than 125 interviews with witnesses, victims, and government officials. It documents the most significant patterns of human rights violations during the Oromo protests from late 2015 until May 2016.
In November 2015 when the protests started, protesters initially focused their concerns on the federal government’s approach to development, particularly the proposed expansion of the capital’s municipal boundary […] for Master Plan.
As the protests continued, the government in mid-January 2016 made a rare concession and announced the cancellation of the Master Plan.
But by then protester grievances had widened due to the brutality of the government response, particularly the high death toll and mass arrests. Farmers and other community members joined the protesting students, raising broader economic, political and cultural grievances shared by many in the ethnic Oromo community.
Human Rights Watch’s research indicates that security forces repeatedly used lethal force, including live ammunition, to break up many of the 500 reported protests that have occurred since November 2015.
Security forces regularly arrested dozens of people at each protest, and in many locations security forces went door-to door-at night arresting students and those accommodating students in their homes. Security forces also specifically targeted for arrest those perceived to be influential members of the Oromo community, such as musicians, teachers, opposition members and others thought to have the ability to mobilize the community for further protests.
Many of those arrested and detained by the security forces have been children under age 18. Very few detainees have had access to legal counsel, adequate food, or to their family members.
Security forces have tortured and otherwise ill-treated detainees, and several female detainees described being raped by security force personnel.
As 52-year-old Yoseph from West Wollega zone put it, “I’ve lived here for my whole life, and I’ve never seen such a brutal crackdown. There are regular arrests and killings of our people, but every family here has had at least one child arrested… All the young people are arrested and our farmers are being harassed or arrested.”
The Ethiopian government has claimed that protesters are connected to banned opposition groups… a staunch advocate for non-violence and for the OFC’s said, “Students peacefully protesting in front of the United States embassy in Addis Ababa have also been charged under the criminal code“.
The Ethiopian government should drop charges and release all those who have been arbitrarily detained and should support a credible, independent and transparent investigation into the use of excessive force by its security forces.
Photo Added: Global Solidarity Rally. Since the start of the Oromo Protests, the Ethiopian government, using its state and affiliated media outlets, has been ridiculing the above photo of unity between Oromo and other Ethiopians – all standing together to oppose the Ethiopian government’s illegal land-grabbing of Oromo farmers’ land and its killing of the peaceful Oromo protesters. This photo has greatly undermined the Ethiopian government’s divide-and-rule policy of the last two decades, when it stayed in power by pitting one group against the other – creating an atmosphere of disunity. (Article: BBC, photo: Minneapolis, Minnesota 12/2015).
It should discipline or prosecute as appropriate those responsible and provide victims of abuses with adequate compensation.
Ethiopia’s brutal crackdown also warrants a much stronger, united response from the international community.
While the European Parliament has passed a strong resolution condemning the crackdown and another resolution has been introduced in the United States Senate, these are exceptions in an otherwise severely muted international response to the crackdown in Oromia.
Ethiopian repression poses a serious threat to the country’s long-term stability and economic ambitions.
Finally, Ethiopia’s international development partners should also reassess their development programming in Oromia to ensure that aid is not being used – directly, indirectly or inadvertently – to facilitate the forced displacement of populations in violation of Ethiopian and international law.
(This article has been shortened).
Oromos make up the largest chunk of Ethiopia’s 95 million people, and their language is the fourth most widely spoken African language across the continent. Yet Oromo is not recognized as a federal working language.
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A promising student who dreamed of going to university, Mary was sixteen when a woman approached her mother at their home and offered to take the Nigerian teenager to Italy to find work. Pushed to go by her family who hoped she would lift them out of poverty, Mary ended up being trafficked into prostitution.
Her voice faltering, Mary described three years of being forced to sell her body, beatings, threats at gunpoint and being made to watch as a fourteen-year-old virgin was raped with a carrot before being sent on to the streets of Turin in northwest Italy.
After being arrested by Italian police, Mary was repatriated to Nigeria’s southern Edo state in 2001, but she was rejected by her family and left feeling like a failure.
“I returned with nothing,” Mary, now 35, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation from Benin city in Edo. “I hated myself.”
While Mary’s ordeal ended fifteen years ago, a soaring number of Nigerian girls like her are being trafficked to Europe – mainly Italy – and forced to sell sex by gangs taking advantage of the chaos caused by the migrant crisis, anti-slavery activists say.
Thousands of women and girls are lured to Europe each year with the promise of work, then trapped by huge debts and bound to their traffickers by a religious ritual – the curse of juju.
“The victims are getting younger as girls, mainly those in rural areas, are more likely to focus on the positive stories of those who made it to Europe and didn’t end up in prostitution,” said Katharine Bryant of the Walk Free Foundation rights group.
She spoke ahead of the launch of the third Global Slavery Index, which found Nigeria has the world’s eighth highest number of slaves – 875,500 – and is a key source country for women trafficked to Europe and sold into sex work.
BOUND BY JUJU
More than 9 in 10 of the Nigerian women trafficked to Europe come from Edo, a predominantly Christian state with a population of about 3 million, according to the United Nations.
Screenshot: Unreported World 2012, Human Trafficking from Nigeria to Italy.
While Edo is not among the country’s poorest states, its history of migration to Italy has fuelled locals’ hopes of easy money in Europe – leaving people vulnerable to traffickers, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) says.
Before going to Europe, women and girls must sign a contract with traffickers to finance their move, racking up debts of up to $100,000. They then must seal the pact with a juju ritual.
“I was taken to a native doctor’s shrine, and told to bite the neck of a chicken to add its blood to a concoction made with bits of my hair and fingernails, and my underwear,” Mary said.
This belief in black magic means victims fear they or their family may fall ill or die if they do not pay off their debts.
Most of the women and girls know they will have to sell sex but are pressured by their families and deceived by traffickers, said Nigeria’s anti-human trafficking agency (NAPTIP).
Many have no idea they will live under the control of older “madams” and be forced to work for several years to clear their debts, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Madams, who make up almost half of traffickers in Nigeria, are mostly former victims who target others in order to escape prostitution – perpetuating a cycle of exploitation, the UNODC said in its latest global report on human trafficking.
MIGRANT CRISIS
Traffickers and gangs in Nigeria are now exploiting Europe’s migration crisis – moving girls to lawless Libya, before crossing the Mediterranean to Italy on flimsy, overloaded boats, said Bryant from the Walk Free Foundation.
More than 5,600 Nigerian women and girls arrived in Italy by sea last year, up from 1,200 in 2014, and at least four in five were trafficked into sex work, the IOM said.
At least 1,250 Nigerian women have landed in Italy this year, up from 373 for the same period in 2015, IOM data shows.
Traffickers also take victims to Europe by plane, using forged documents and flying via other West African countries to avoid suspicion, said Mikael Jensen of the UNODC.
British airports such as Gatwick are increasingly used as entry points by Nigerian trafficking gangs with forged documents, Spanish police said earlier this year.
“Many traffickers are careful with their goods, they don’t want to risk them on a dangerous sea crossing,” Jensen said.
About 3,770 migrants and refugees died in 2015 crossing the Mediterranean, making it the deadliest year on record for those fleeing conflict and poverty, according to the IOM.
RE-TRAFFICKED
Human trafficking by Nigerian organised crime gangs is one of the greatest challenges facing police forces across Europe, according to the EU’s law enforcement agency Europol.
Italy is a destination and transit country for women, children, and men subjected to sex trafficking and forced labor.
A lack of coordination between European states and Nigeria is allowing traffickers to act with impunity, said Kevin Hyland, who was appointed Britain’s first anti-slavery chief in 2014.
“There has been some progress, but it’s been a piecemeal plan, and responsive rather than proactive,” Hyland said.
Nigerian anti-trafficking official Arinze Orakwe said more European nations should criminalise the purchase of sex to curb the number of Nigerians trafficked into prostitution in Europe.
“If nobody is buying, nobody will sell,” said the official at NAPTIP, which has rescued some 1,340 victims in Nigeria over the past year, and works with NGOs to support them.
The Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation (WOTCLEF) clothes and feeds victims, provides counselling and attempts to reunite them with their families.
“But sometimes families are hostile, and not interested in getting them back,” said WOTCLEF coordinator Veronica Umaru.
Disillusioned by her parents’ disappointment at her return home, Mary hoped to go back to Italy before being referred to Girls’ Power Initiative, a Nigerian NGO that housed her, trained her to run a business and encouraged her to help other victims.
Yet Mary says many former victims have been re-trafficked to Italy, and fears not enough is being done to stop traffickers or persuade women and girls not to go abroad and into prostitution.
“Girls today, unlike me, know exactly what they are in for when they agree to go to Italy to work,” Mary says tearfully.
“But they do not understand the trauma they will face.”
On April 19, staff of International Organization for Migration traveled to Kalamata, Greece to gather information from witnesses to a reported shipwreck that may have caused the deaths of upwards of 400 migrants and refugees in the Mediterranean Sea.
Late Tuesday, after learning that 41 survivors of a shipwreck in the area had been brought to Kalamata, IOM joined representatives from other agencies to seek further information on the reports, which had not yet been confirmed by authorities in the region. On Wednesday, IOM staff met some of the 41 survivors, who said they were rescued on Saturday (16 April) by a Filipino cargo ship off the Libyan coast. That vessel brought them to Greece.
The survivors confirmed the following details of the shipwreck: They left the port of Tobruk, Libya, on several small boats—each carrying between 30 and 40 people—for a total of 200 migrantsbound for a larger vessel on the high seas. When these survivors arrived, they say they saw that the larger ship already was overcrowded and carrying some 300 passengers. The journey from Tobruk to the larger boat took many hours, these survivors told IOM staff.
Once transferred to the larger vessel – now with an estimated500 on board – it began taking on water, they reported. The vessel started to sink and panicking passengers tried to jump into the smaller boats they had arrived in, some of which were still nearby. The survivors told IOM that most of those aboard the larger vessel tragically died.
Some 30 traumatized migrants remained aboard one of the smaller boats and they were joined by ten others who managed to swim to safety.
The survivors report that migrants came mainly from Egypt, Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia. The migrants also claimed to the IOM staff that each of them paid from US $800 – $2,000 to the smugglers in order to reach Europe.
A man named Mohamed, from Ethiopia, told IOM staff that he was travelling with his family: “I saw my wife and my two-month old child die at sea, together with my brother-in-law,” Mohamed said. “The boat was going down…down…, all the people died in a matter of minutes. After the shipwreck we drifted at sea for a few days, without food, without anything, I think (sic) I was going to die. When we were rescued we were told them that we wanted to go to Italy, but we have been brought to Greece.”
“The testimonies we gathered are heartbreaking,” said IOM Athens Chief of Mission Daniel Esdras. “We await further investigations by authorities to better understand what actually happened and find hopefully evidence against criminal smugglers.”
The latest tragic loss of life, if confirmed, will bring it to nearly800 the number of migrants who have perished on the Mediterranean Sea’s central route between North Africa and Europe so far this year.
Additionally, about 380 migrants reportedly have died in 2016 on the Eastern Mediterranean Route between Turkey and Greece and some five migrants on the Western Route linking Morocco to Spain.
All told, IOM’s Missing Migrants project counts to around 1,200 migrants killed this year on all Mediterranean routes.
Last year, through the entire month of April, IOM reported over 1,730 migrants lost their lives or went missing. [01]
A Burundian soldier walks in front of residents during a demonstration against the Rwandan government in Burundi’s capital Bujumbura, Feb. 20, 2016.
When U.N. Security Council envoys flew to Burundi in January to try to end months of violence, the central African country’s leader flatly rejected their offer of help and hundreds protested against what they saw as meddling.
A month later, with fears of a new ethnic conflict growing a decade after a civil war ended, diplomats say Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will step up peace efforts by visiting Burundi for talks on Tuesday with President Pierre Nkurunziza.
The U.N. is under growing pressure to show it can halt the bloodshed in Burundi, two decades after the 1994 genocide of ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus by the Hutu majority in neighboring Rwanda, which has a similar ethnic make-up.
But Nkurunziza has rejected a proposal for the 54-nation African Union to send in peacekeepers and shows no sign of changing the message he gave the U.N. Security Council envoys in January — that Burundi is “up to 99 percent secure.”
Burundi’s President Pierre Nkurunziza, center, and U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power, left, speak to the media in Gitega, Burundi, Jan. 22, 2016.
“He’s in total denial about what is going on,” Amr Aboulatta, Egypt’s ambassador to the U.N., said of the Jan. 22 talks at a hilltop residence outside the capital Bujumbura. Aboulatta suggested the Security Council, whose purpose is to maintain international security, must now be “more sensitive, more cautious and take things step by step.”
But Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has made clear the need for action is pressing in the landlocked country of 10 million.
“What Burundi needs urgently is an inclusive broadened mediation, and an expanded international presence … we have a responsibility to try again and again to convince the president to stop rejecting offers of international support,” she said.
Death toll rising
The U.N. says at least 439 people have been killed in the violence, which began after Nkurunziza’s decision last April to seek a third term, and that the number could be “considerably higher.” About 240,000 have fled the country.
Since a failed coup last May, Bujumbura has been hit by frequent shootings and grenade attacks aimed at civilians and police, who have frequently mounted raids at night on districts in the capital which the government says are hotbeds of anti-Nkurunziza sentiment.
The United Nations is investigating reports of mass graves, the crisis has triggered foreign aid cuts and Burundi, one of the world’s poorest countries, is facing an economic disaster.
This has prompted calls from human rights groups for the U.N. to be more assertive in Burundi, where 300,000 people were killed in the 1993-2005 civil war.
Like Rwanda, Burundi’s population is about 85 percent Hutu and about 15 percent Tutsi.
“The Security Council needs to quickly shift from early warning to preventive action. It should convince the Burundian government to accept a strong U.N. political mission with an international police component,” said Philippe Bolopion, Deputy Director for Global Advocacy at New-York-based Human Rights Watch.
Urging talks
Diplomats say Ban will push Nkurunziza for political talks and a greater international presence, but it is not clear what the United Nations can do if the president continues to refuse outside help.
Burundi opposition members sit during peace talks at Entebbe State House, east of Uganda’s capital Kampala, Dec. 28, 2015.
A U.N. political mission in Burundi stopped operating in 2014 at the government’s request and Ban’s lead official on Burundi, Jamal Benomar, has only a small team on the ground.
Nkurunziza has also rejected the African Union’s proposal to send in 5,000 peacekeepers because he says it would amount to an invasion.
“At some point the world has to wonder what you’re hiding if you’re adamant about preventing any independent eyes and ears on the ground,” Tom Perriello, U.S. Special Envoy to Africa’s Great Lakes Region, told Reuters.
UN peacekeepers?
After asking the U.N. peacekeeping department to prepare contingency plans in case Burundi spirals out of control, the Security Council is now likely to request options for sending U.N. police, seizing on a proposal by Russia, diplomats say.
“The idea of U.N. police — and the format, the conditions, the modalities of course must be discussed — is potentially a productive idea. That is one of the ideas we must work on,” French U.N. Ambassador Francois Delattre told reporters.
Russia initially opposed action over Nkurunziza’s decision to run for a third term because it saw it as a constitutional matter of a sovereign state.
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, second right, speaks with other U.N. Security Council ambassadors during a meeting with the Burundian president at his residence outside Bujumbura, Jan. 22, 2016.
But after violence worsened following his victory in a disputed election last July, Russia and China – both veto-holding permanent members of the Security Council – backed a resolution in November aimed at boosting a U.N. presence and threatening “additional measures” against those fueling the crisis.
Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Petr Iliichev, said his understanding was that Nkurunziza had expressed interest in the possibility of international assistance for Burundi’s police.
“We should not lose the momentum because there is some kind of openness from the Burundi government,” he told Reuters. But he added: “If we move very attentively, very cautiously, it will be better for everyone.”
But Burundi’s U.N. ambassador, Albert Shingiro, made clear any potential U.N. help would be limited to assisting in the development, or “capacity-building”, of the police and monitoring the border with Rwanda.
“We don’t need an armed mission, it would be a civilian mission for capacity-building … it would be a small, limited number,” he told Reuters.
Targeted sanctions
The United States and the European Union have imposed targeted sanctions on several Burundians over the crisis, but the African Union and the Security Council have not followed suit. Iliichev said there was no need for U.N. sanctions.
The crisis in Burundi has raised fears of violence spreading beyond its borders, heightening tension with Rwanda over accusations that it is meddling.
Kigali has denied reports of Burundian refugees being recruited and trained in Rwanda, with the aim of ousting Nkurunziza, though the United States says the reports are credible.
Some diplomats say the reports could be a way to convince Nkurunziza to accept a greater international presence by suggesting it could help monitor the border with Rwanda.
Boko Haram—the regional affiliate of Islamic State and one of the world’s deadliest terrorist groups—has accelerated its campaign of almost daily suicide bombings. Just last month, the group massacred 86 people, many of them children, in the Nigerian village of Dalori and 32 others in the Cameroonian village of Bodo.
To the west, al Qaeda’s regional franchise has been waging war on the government of Mali and expanded its reach last month to the previously peaceful country of Burkina Faso, slaying at least 30 people—many of them Westerners—in an assault on a luxury hotel.
In the east, another al Qaeda affiliate, Somalia’s al-Shabaab, overran an African Union military base three weeks ago and slaughtered more than 100 Kenyan troops.
Today the area has become the fastest-growing front of global jihad—and perhaps its deadliest.
“The Islam that is spreading through society in Africa today is the new active Islam, not the dormant, Sufi, private-life only [version]. It’s going into policy, into economy, into culture, into education. It’s going into public life,” said Hassan al-Turabi, the leading ideologue of political Islam in Africa, who hosted Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders as Sudan’s de facto ruler in the 1990s.
Hassan al-Turabi, a leading Islamist ideologue, gives a speech in Khartoum, Sudan, 2014.(Photo: M. Nureldin Abdallah/ Reuters).
Facing this challenge, the U.S. and other Western countries have increasingly chosen to prop up chronically weak African states that can’t handle the onslaught on their own.
In 2013, France launched an outright military intervention to prevent a jihadist takeover of Mali, a former French colony, and Paris still maintains some 3,500 troops in Mali, Niger, Mauritania, Burkina Faso and Chad.
Since then, the U.S. has established a drone base in Niger and is setting up another in Cameroon, in addition to sending special-operations forces to several countries in the region. The U.K. also has dispatched military personnel to help fight Boko Haram.
Africa is now crisscrossed by war zones stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.
Thus far, the rivalry between Islamic State and al Qaeda—Sunni terrorist groups that differ in their tactics and policies but have similar aims – has kept these insurgencies separate, but that may not last.
Meanwhile, the operations of these African militant groups have become increasingly sophisticated, often thanks to expertise and advice shared by their patrons and allies in the Middle East.
Widespread Internet access and increasingly easy travel have made these connections far simpler than just a decade ago. The collapse of the Libyan state in 2011 and the subsequent takeover of several Libyan towns by affiliates of Islamic State and al Qaeda also provided a nearby redoubt of jihadist control and ambition.
Boko Haram — which roughly translates to “Western education is forbidden” — recently declared its allegiance to Islamic State and has put the new connection to use, Western and African officials say.
The group has refined its propaganda videos, procured new weapons and improved its roadside-bombing techniques.
The aftermath of a deadly al Qaeda assault on the Splendid Hotel, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, in January 2016. (Photo: Outer Elsen/EPP Agency).
“To plan the kind of operations that Boko Haram carries out, you need people of proven intelligence. They must be receiving explosives specialists and strategists,” said Brig. Gen.Jacob Kodji, who commands Cameroonian forces battling Boko Haram in the country’s war-ravaged Far North region. “What they want is to create a caliphate and dominate a good part of Africa.”
As the continent’s weak, secular, postcolonial states have failed to deliver prosperity, basic services and good governance, their legitimacy has frayed — and their frustrated citizens have increasingly sought answers in Islam.
In doing so, they often have abandoned the traditional religious establishment and adopted uncompromising ideologies imported from the Middle East, where a similar process began generations earlier.
“These people would say, ‘Your problems exist because you are led by the Western system, and as long as you don’t take the great Islamic way, these problems will remain.’ that’s a very simple and effective explanation, and it worked,” said Moussa Tchangari,who runs a human-rights group called Alternatives Espaces Citoyens in Niger.
In Niger and many neighboring countries, the pace of this form of Islamization has been dizzying.
The surprising degree of Islamization in Niger, which officially remains a secular republic, burst into the open a year ago, after the deadly jihadist attack in Paris on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Niger’s president, Mahamadou Issoufou, who is close to French President François Hollande, swiftly jetted to Paris to walk alongside other world leaders in a huge street march against violent extremism.
But back home in Niger, many saw Mr. Issoufou’s visit as an endorsement of Charlie Hebdo’s allegedly blasphemous cartoons about Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.
Furious crowds gathered in the capital, Niamey, and in provincial cities, torching more than 40 churches and the French cultural center. At least 10 people died in the rioting, which lasted days and deeply unsettled the country’s Christian minority.
Of course, Islam—and even Islamic radicalism—aren’t new to sub-Saharan Africa.
A young fighter from the Islamist group Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, Gao, Mali, July 17, 2012.(Photo: Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty).
Only the arrival of European colonialists — and Christian missionaries… created a Muslim-Christian religious divide that still dominates the politics of many African countries, such as Nigeria and Ivory Coast, and led to the 2011 breakup of Sudan.
With few exceptions, however, African Islam remained traditionally Sufi and uninvolved in politics.
In the era of European empires and the first decades of postcolonial independence, such syncretic practices remained largely unaffected by the political and religious changes sweeping the Middle East.
But after the global rise of political Islam that followed the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Africa became increasingly connected to the broader Muslim world — and Africa’s Sufi traditions came under attack.
Though Shiite Iran has made some inroads, particularly in Nigeria, with conversions to its minority sect of Islam, the charge in Africa has been led by Saudi Arabia’s ultraconservative Sunni religious establishment. Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, the puritanical 18th-century preacher whose teachings remain the foundation of the Saudi state, deemed Sufis heretics and ordered the razing of their graves and shrines.
For Saudi clerics, eliminating such heretical “innovations” and returning to the pure, strict Islam practiced by the Prophet Muhammad became the focus of world-wide religious outreach.
The arrival of modern communications accelerated this trend, bringing Africa’s once-isolated Muslim communities into the turmoil sweeping the broader Islamic world—and undermining the power of traditional clergy who had preached accommodation with governments and non-Muslims.
“Internet and mobile telephony have turned the slow drip into a fire hose,” said J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
“A lot of West African Islam was based on practices that were not typical in Orthodox Sunni Islam, on ritual rather than learning and scholarship. But in a world where anyone can look up theology on the Internet, it is no longer credible.”
Proselytizing efforts by Saudi charities—and, to a lesser extent, by institutions from Qatar and Turkey—also have flooded Africa with money.
Thousands of African theology students have been trained in the Middle East in recent decades, particularly at Saudi Arabia’s Islamic University of Medina, often to return as teachers or imams at the lavish new mosques that the Saudi kingdom has built across the continent.
“What they brought back is an Islam that doesn’t take into account the realities of our countries,” said Ali Abdel-Rhamane Haggar, the rector of the University of N’Djamena in Chad and a former adviser to the country’s president. “But it’s easy to recruit amid the poverty, and the Wahhabis are very rich.”
“The traditional imams have always been seen as men of the system, preaching patience and not struggle. As the system is not working, more people are getting closer to those who contest rather than those who legitimize what is going on,” said Mr. Tchangari, the human-rights activist in Niger.
Perhaps the strongest such Saudi-inspired revivalist movement in Africa is the Izala Society (formally known as the Society for the Removal of Innovation and Re-establishment of the Sunnah), which sprang up in northern Nigeria in the late 1970’s to campaign against Sufi practices. It has since gained ground in several neighboring countries.
Al-Shabaab gunmen patrol a market in Mogadishu, Somalia, June 2009. (Photo: Mustafa Abdi/ AFP/ Getty).
A leading Izala-influenced sheik was Ja’afar Adam, a graduate of the Islamic University of Medina who presided over a popular mosque in the Nigerian city of Kano.
One of his favorite pupils was Mohammed Yusuf, the preacher who would go on to establish today’s Boko Haram.
Yusuf, who repeatedly traveled to Saudi Arabia, quickly became much more radical, seeking to destroy rather than to change existing African states such as Nigeria and rejecting any Western influence in the Muslim world.
In 2007, after Adam publicly condemned his former student, Yusuf ordered the scholar’s assassination.
Having spawned Boko Haram, the Izala Society has become one of its main targets, and several prominent Saudi-backed clerics have been gunned down since then.
“It’s one of the unintended consequences. People adopt the Saudi ideology and internalize it, and then they realize that Saudi Arabia itself is not living up to that ideology, and so it becomes their enemy,” said Jacob Zenn, a specialist on Nigeria and African security at the Jamestown Foundation.
Under his even more radical successor, Abubakar Shekau, Boko Haram formally became the “West Africa Province” of Islamic State last year, abandoning some of its more idiosyncratic ideas and embracing the ideology of Islamic State’s self-styled caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Boko Haram has devastated large parts of Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger, launching attacks that sometimes have involved up to a thousand militants, as well as tanks stolen from Nigerian armories.
At least 17,000 people have died in the continuing conflict, and 2.6 million have been uprooted from their homes.
Lately, Boko Haram’s favorite tactic has become sending suicide bombers —often children— to kill and maim worshipers at Sufi mosques.
“These people think that all the Muslim communities that aren’t like them are unbelievers. This is how they brainwash those children,” said Sheikh Abdadayim Abdoulaye Ousman, a Sufi cleric who oversees Chad’s Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs. “For these extremists, the goal is power, not religion.”
Even Mr. Turabi, now a Sudanese opposition politician, says that he is perturbed by how violent the African Islamist awakening that he championed for decades has become, especially in the case of Boko Haram.
“It’s a revival, but when they are faced with a challenge, they become very active, even overactive,” Mr. Turabi said. “They want to hit, to struggle and destroy—but they do not know how to build anything.”
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